Bad weather coming: linking social media and weather sensor data

Abstract : In this paper we leverage the power of citizen supplied data. We examined how both physical weather sensor data (obtained from the weather underground API) and social media data (obtained from Twitter) can serve to improve local community awareness during a severe weather event. A local tornado warning was selected due to its small scale and isolated geographic area, and only Twitter data found from within this geo -locational area was used. Our results indicate that during a severe weather event, an increase in weather activity obtained from the local weather sensors does correlate with an increase in local social media usage. The data found on social media also contains additional information from, and about the community of interest during the event. While this study focuses on a small scale event, it provides the groundwork for use during a much larger weather event.